Building sites on a MASSIVE scale

I told myself I wasn’t going to mention this in a public fashion until I was more sure of its results, features, stability, etc. But then I’d hate to think that people whom I consider friends (as I feel many of you reading this have become!) missed out somehow because I took my time.

So, what am I going on about? Well as many of you undoubtedly know, I’ve been using NicheCreator for a month or so now, and I like it a LOT. Prior to that, I was using Traffic Equalizer, which I’ve stopped using now that I have NC.

However, as great as NC is, there has been one nagging thing bothering me about it, which is its lack of any kind of centralized site-management. I’ve looked at a few other things for mass blog publishing, cloaking, etc. but I just hadn’t found anything that seemed to handle all the pieces of the puzzle, all together. At least, not until now.

I came upon this the other night after a chat with another well respected site builder, and have been unable to think of much else ever since. I keep coming up with more things it could do, or more ways to use the power I see under the hood. See for yourself here.

The really cool thing (well, one of many), is that for now IT’S FREE! They haven’t decided what they’re going to charge yet, and are still technically in beta, so it is free for all to use. It looks like it will work with any hosting, but they are partners with hostland, whom I have also opened an account with (again, FREE for the first 30 days… how cool is that?).

Back to TurboSM. It’s a dynamic site generation program much like NC, but with a single centralized user interface for ALL your sites. That interface is hosted on their servers, with a local copy of your site stored on your own hosting, for speed of access. The site is cached in BOTH places, so you have a server side cache (on their server) and a client side cache (on your server) which can be utilized together in interesting ways. The important part is, you can have the appearance of static content for a specified length of time, which is a big issue since content that rotates on every single page refresh is such a dead giveaway of a machine generated site.

Potential issues: Since the core software is hosted by them on THEIR servers, if they go down, you have a problem. Fortunately however, you can fairly easily have your sites use your local cache only, which would probably solve any major problems at least in the short term. So, it would be good to know who these folks are, and feel we can trust their uptime. Also of course, you are reliant upon them to stay in business, and therefore have to keep paying (once they start charging, which I’m sure at some point they will). There is a mention on their site of possibly allowing people to buy the server side software at some point to host themselves, and if that happens then all concerns of their servers staying up will go away.

Anyway, the feature list on this thing is huge. It looks to be insanely powerful, and with that power comes complexity. This is not for those who don’t like to get their hands dirty, or are afraid of html-level code. It has its own somewhat unique way of handling tokens and variables, which is infinitely flexible but could confuse or scare the total newbie.

If you’re up for another major round of learning, that could lead to you being able to put up thousands of sites in short order, you might want to have a look at this, especially as long as it’s still free. You can’t pass that up, certainly!

Don’t feel bad for not quite understanding it. I actually abandoned TurboSM fairly quickly. As interesting as it appeared to be, it was just too complicated to get working properly. I stuck with NichCreator but added a number of my own modifications to it, to make it do some things I wanted but that were not built into it.